Armee d'Espagne

The Armee d'Espagne was a 278,670-strong army of the First French Empire that was deployed to Spain during the Peninsular War of 1808-1814. The army was brought to Spain by Emperor Napoleon I himself in 1808 after the Spanish rebelled against Bonapartist rule, with 100,000 of the army's almost 280,000 troops being Grande Armee veterans. The army overran much of Spain and northern Portugal from 1808 to 1810, and Napoleon left Spain forever after winning at Somosierra. The army was left in the hands of marshals such as Jean-de-Dieu Soult, Claude-Victor Perrin, Louis Gabriel Suchet, Jean-Baptiste Jourdan, and Auguste Marmont, and the Armee d'Espagne was worn down through pitched battles with the armies of the United Kingdom and Portugal under Viscount Wellington and William Carr Beresford and through guerrilla warfare from Spanish guerrillas. The French army suffered heavily from the "Spanish ulcer", and they ended the war in Toulouse, southern France in April 1814 after the Allied forces began to force the French to fight on their home soil.